Friday, January 27, 2012

Why Funny Kid Quotes are Funny

99% of the time when people share funny kid quotes, the reason they are funny is because the child lacks some sort of understanding about the world and acted on whatever information he/she had.

A few days ago at bath time, JT demonstrated his lack of understanding on two things:
1) When a substance is in liquid form, it's not really possible to pick it up with a pincer grasp.
2) We say "thank you" when we receive something, not when we're handing it over.

It was bath time. JT reached out towards the little jets of water coming from the shower head and pinched one of them. Satisfied that he must've been holding the stream of water between his fingers, he held his hand out to give it to me. I decided to humor him and held out my hand and he proceeded to place the water that was not there into my palm. "Thank you," I told him.

"Da oo!" he replied. Then he did it again. Only he seemed to think that "Da oo" is either the word for water or the word for handing something over. So he sat there, pinching the water and thanking me as he handed it over.

It'll be interesting to see what odd lines this kid devises when he has more than a six-word vocabulary.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Impromptu Retreat

It's writing conference season again and for the first time in I think four years, I'm not sure I'll be going to one.

For a couple (good) reasons, I don't foresee myself having a manuscript available to pitch, which is one of the main reasons to go to a writers' conference. The workshops sound nice enough, but I can't argue myself into spending money to stay the weekend listening to them when there's several local writers' events for less or even for free. (Yeah, I'm cheap.)

So I started looking at a writers' retreat in my area. And I discovered, to my disappointment that it was basically a conference too. (To emphasize: Writers' conferences are awesome. It's just that I was looking for something else.)

You know what would be nice, I thought. A day or two away from everything to just relax and write. Maybe a nice view of the outdoors. Just me and my laptop. And maybe some chai tea.

You know, something that was right there at home.



Seriously. It was a snowy day, the baby was at Grandma's, and I had a bottle of chai tea latte and a big fuzzy blanet.

Yup, it was a nice morning. And I didn't even have to pay conference fees.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

First Post of the New Year


Hope everyone had a great holiday, I know we did. (Yes, holidays take extra long with us. What this blog post didn't mention is that we have one more birthday in the family shortly after New Years, and everyone got together to celebrate that too.)

Now, I feel weird typing this post because so many people have asked how holidays went with the baby. While he was technically born this time last year, he wasn't interacting much, and the holidays were still squarely in that, "Just try to get as much sleep as possible" part of his life.

So, while I've told the story several times already, here it is again: The holidays were fun. The baby did open presents. I didn't think he knew how to open presents, because he kinda floundered with it on his birthday, but as he crawled about the house and came to the tree, he decided to play with the brightly-colored boxes and learned that wrapping paper rips. He tore one-inch segments off, got tape stuff on his fingers, and made hilarious expressions because of it.

Oh, and he walks. Not well, but he does. I didn't even get to announcing that he could crawl, and now he walks.

Now, the other one of us really needs to get things in gear, because so help me if I'm still on the agent hunt when my kid goes to kindergarten.